Dear universe,

You have had a lot of unfair publicity ever since humans could conceptualize you. We like to personify the things that we can’t comprehend with science; our ancestors saw a God’s tears pouring from the sky on a stormy day, or the wrath of the Earth venting in monstrous, destructive plumes from volcanoes. You’re a vast, unfathomable thing, freckled with diamond planets and boiling spheres of ice; harboring quasar groups that break the laws of nature with their size; sprayed with molecular clouds that smell like rum, taste like raspberries, and act like poison. We are just tiny miracles of cells and energy, trying to control you by unraveling your mysteries.

Until we know how to manipulate you, we’ll keep asking a void of space for unreasonable favors. I know, logically, you won’t send me a fairy godmother to help me through my next interview, or listen to my pleas for a winning lottery ticket, or fix my stubborn cellulite. You don’t work like that. You are too busy dealing with supernovae and black holes and magnetars to care about how the snow in Fort Collins, Colorado, Earth, will make a human late to volunteer work by an abstract amount of time.

Understand, it is frightening for our kind to think that we mean nothing. Nihilism comes from the idea that we’re only a mote of dust clinging to your heel, watching you grow, grow, grow and render us less significant with every inch. But we have you all wrong, universe. Your immensity doesn’t make us unimportant. We can choose to believe that nothing matters since we are so small, or we can choose to believe that life on Earth means even more because we are all that we have.

I found peace in looking at you from this angle, universe. From the greater perspective, my mark on the world means little to you, but I am not trying to make you notice me. I am trying to make the Earth more beautiful for its brief stay on your plane of existence because as humans, that is all we can do. My mission is clear, promising, and I feel more grounded in the future that was once nebulous to me.

Universe, we matter to us.

With love and awe,

Kaylin Thomas